My middle name is Louise, for Grannie, but this did not make her like me anymore or stop thinking I was a bad child who needed taking in hand.
One thing that annoyed her year after year was that my mother would send me down there with suitcases full of starched and ironed dress-up dresses. I would wear several of them a day, changing clothes as the mood suited me and throwing the dirty ones on the floor. I would climb trees and sit in the treehouse in white pique dresses or pink linen dresses or whatever suited my fancy.
One summer, when I was there for a month while my brother had his eye operated on, she sent for a seamstress to make me some practical seersucker playsuits. They were a child’s version of the shirtwaist dresses in which she lived her life. I hated them and would not put them on until finally she wore me down by telling me how hard the seamstress had worked to make them and how sad the seamstress’s life was and how disappointed she was going to be if she found out I didn’t like the things she had struggled so hard to make for me.
Shades of The Poor Little Match Girl, a story she had read to me when I was learning how to read. Yes, I would wear the playsuits, I decided. I would not be the mean person who added to the store of a poor seamstress’s troubles. Besides, by then I had realized how much easier it was to climb trees in playsuits than in starched dresses. Also, I had decided the playsuits made me look like Jane in the Tarzan books, which had influenced me so much the year before that I had gone to the refrigerator and gotten out some raw meat and tried to eat it. When Tarzan and his friends made a kill in the forest they always took the raw meat in their hands and devoured it hungrily, savoring the hot, bloody taste. The meat I got from our refrigerator was neither hot nor bloody, and I knew I would never be a huntress if that was the reward.
After I settled into my seersucker playsuit mode I played Tarzan for days. Sometimes I was Jane, in my full playsuit, fixing lunch for Tarzan on magnolia leaves with mimosa blossoms in my hair. Sometimes I was Tarzan himself, with my halter pulled down around my waist so I could beat on my chest to call my elephants in emergencies. Sometimes my cousin Sykes was there and I would let him be Tarzan while I was either Jane or a band of chimpanzees or mountain apes.
Sykes was the grandson of Ellen Martin, for whom I was either named or not named, and he was a perfect companion. He was a year younger than I was and he was an only child. It has been my experience that only children make wonderful friends. Perhaps this is because they are not in the habit of fighting for power like children with close siblings. Perhaps it is because they are hungry for playmates and work harder to be pleasant.
Sykes was game for anything I thought up to do, even though he was watched very closely by his mother and grandmother and forbidden to do anything that was dangerous. His grandmother lived in horror he would be hurt and would have lectured him to within an inch of him losing his hearing if she had found out half the things we found to do in Courtland, Alabama.
We climbed to the top of a lookout tower, which was forbidden. We swam in a cow pond. Completely forbidden. We climbed to the top of a sixty-foot-tall magnolia tree in front of the Courtland Presbyterian Church. Not exactly forbidden since they had forgotten to tell us not to do that.
Unless you have spent time climbing magnolia trees you might not know that their trunks are covered with a thick black pitch only Clorox bleach will remove from clothes. It would have made sense if our grandmothers got mad about that but they did not. They were just, and would not scold us for something they had forgotten to forbid.
My grandmother was fierce but she was not indomitable. Sometimes she would tire of overseeing me and would send me out into the country to visit plantations run by younger, stronger cousins. My favorite was a plantation where the father drank and the mother had four small children. I could do anything I liked out there but I was never allowed to spend the night. I wanted very much to spend the night out there. I had heard the father got so drunk one night he climbed into a baby bed by mistake and slept there. I wanted to be there if it happened again. I had never seen a person get drunk and I was curious about it.
A place I was allowed to visit any time I wanted was my Great-Uncle George’s house, which was a block from my grandmother’s. It was a large, square, white mansion sitting in the middle of two acres of untended weeds and pecan trees. I would dress in nice clothes and walk over there to visit Uncle George and Aunt Suzy and go down in their storm cellar to look at the canned goods.
The mansion contained every newspaper and piece of string and rubber band that had ever been delivered there, plus every box and jar and magazine. By the time I was visiting there was almost no place left to sit down but Uncle George and Aunt Suzy would scurry around rearranging stacks of newspapers and find a place for me. We would talk about things for awhile. I would tell them everything that was going on, in Harrisburg, Illinois, where I lived, and out at Summerwood where Sykes lived and also plots of movies I had seen or books I had read. Then Uncle George would straighten his tie and put on his seersucker jacket and his hat and we would walk to town to get ice cream cones. We would eat them as we walked back towards the mansion across the stubble-covered field that was Uncle George’s yard. It was hard to keep up a conversation and also keep the ice cream from running down my hand but I could do it. For his part, Uncle George, who was in his seventies and at least six feet four inches tall, never spilled a drop on his coat or tie. When we got back to the mansion we would go into the living room and I would help Uncle George and Aunt Suzy move the sofa and the Indian rug and open the trap door that led to the cellar. We would go down a set of wooden stairs into a long tunnel with wooden supports and shelves cut into earthen walls. The shelves were filled with canned goods as old as many of the newspapers in the house. It was comforting to know we had a place to go in case of a tornado or domestic war. I took this as one more example of the riches of my family.
The summer I was twelve I brought my best friend, Cynthia Hancock, to Courtland with me. She was the prettiest girl in our school and could tap dance and twirl batons and play the piano and choreograph dance routines, among other talents. She was the most popular girl in Harrisburg and being her best friend was a surefire way to be elected cheerleader and never run out of boyfriends, as the ones she tired of always turned to me for sympathy.
Everyone in Courtland fell in love with her. Not only Sykes but my older cousins too, boys who had paid scant attention to me until I showed up with Cynthia by my side.
Grannie loved Cynthia and approved of her, as she was quiet and polite and acted the way Grannie thought young ladies were supposed to act. So Grannie didn’t object when Cynthia and I decided to set up headquarters in her attic.
Grannie had a superb attic. During the Second World War, when Courtland was the site of an Air Corps Training Base, the attic had been floored and turned into an apartment for a pilot and his wife. There was still an alcove with two large fans and a dresser and an iron bed covered with a pretty chenille bedspread. The attic had an exotic feel, as if it had never lost the excitement and dark romance of aviation and young marriage and war.
We dusted the place and swept the floor and washed and dried the gauzy curtains in the dormer window that looked out upon the treehouse. At night, when Grannie was in bed reading Scottish histories, we would lie on the bed sipping the crème de menthe we found in the dresser and pretend we were movie stars or beautiful young women with pilots for boyfriends.
Cynthia was fascinated by the flowers or gardenias to put on the dresser. Later, when we were getting ready to be driven home, she made a collection of all the local flowers. We wrapped the stems in wet cotton and nursed them all the way home to Harrisburg, a twelve-hour car trip in those days.
My fifteen-year-old cousin, Quart McWhorter, had a driver’s license and Grannie would let us get in the car with him at night and drive to the closed filling station to get Cokes out of the Coke machine. We would drive around town with the windows down and then out to the abandoned air force base to
drive up and down the runways in the moonlight. An even older cousin, Bobby Tweedy, age sixteen, was also allowed to take us riding in his car, since his grandmother was one of the afternoon tea drinkers.
Cynthia’s presence was opening doors for me in Courtland. Now, not only was it a place where I read books, it was becoming a place where we could act them out. Who loved Cynthia? Who did Cynthia love? How far away in kin do you have to be to love someone? This was an important issue as I was related to everyone in town and if all cousins were verboten I would be left out of love. I finally decided that Bobby Tweedy was the only one far enough away in kinship to guarantee my children would not be blind if I married him. So I decided to love Bobby. There was no danger that he would love me back so it was a perfect romance. A love affair I completely made up was a love affair I could control.
All things being equal I would probably have rather loved Sykes, for his blond hair and unfailing good nature and ability to stand up to his grandmother but Bobby Tweedy was also very handsome and had the added virtue of being able to shake a Coca-Cola until it spewed a fountain ten feet in the air.
“Oh, Bobby, Bobby,” I would say to Cynthia as we cuddled down in the iron bed to go to sleep. “I have to tell you that I love you. I do. I really do. I have to admit it.”
“Oh, Sykes, Sykes, oh, Quart,” she would answer. “I love you too. I think we should get married and have children.”
Then we would dissolve in laughter, laughing so hard we almost fell off the bed. How did we know it was funny? How did we know romantic love was so absolutely funny?
Grannie seemed to stop worrying about me the summer Cynthia was there. I guess she thought Cynthia would keep an eye on me, or else, perhaps a new Thomas Costain novel had come in the mail and she was too caught up in the plot to care.
As I got older Grannie and I became better friends. Maybe I had taught her to like girls after all. Or maybe, just maybe, she had recognized traits in me that could only have come from her gene pool. Later in my life I met and knew the grandchildren of her sisters and they became true soul mates among my huge store of cousins. They are mostly bookish, bossy women who married Newsweek editors or became Episcopal lay readers or early civil rights workers or architects or anything else they could think up to do to dominate and challenge, to civilize and question.
Because my grandmothers were so wonderful to me I have always loved being a grandmother. The first grandchild, whose mother was my close friend, has always been as close to me as my own child. His mother and father let me have him whenever I wanted him for as long as I wanted him to stay. He had a tent in the center of my living room and a permanent place in the center of my heart. His two sisters are also very, very close to me. I have not had the constant access to the remaining thirteen children or the great-grandchildren but the way I feel about them is so powerful they feel it and respond to it.
I have tried to make memories for them as wonderful as the ones my grandparents made for me but there is no longer a world where children can come and spend the summer in their grandparents’ homes.
SECTION THREE
A Home in the Highland
Keeping Houses
I LIVE IN TWO PLACES, AND I LOVE THEM BOTH. MY MAIN HOME is in Fayetteville, Arkansas, a college town in the Ozark Mountains. I live on the highest hill in a quiet cul-de-sac, surrounded by friends. When I’m there, I am content to be an adult and talk to other adults and teach graduate students two days a week at the University of Arkansas.
I love Fayetteville. I like hills and vistas and hardworking people and fighting snow in winter and chiggers in the summer. You have to be tough to live in Fayetteville at certain times of the year. January and February and parts of March are bitterly cold and seem to last forever. It doesn’t help that I live in a house built by a famous architect who was a student of Frank Lloyd Wright’s and built my house the summer he came home from Taliesin West. The floors are made of stone and scored concrete. The walls are glass. It is so cold in this house in winter I think I must be a lunatic to stay. Yet I do stay because it’s beautiful. Jones disliked putting gutters on his houses, so the pitched roofs make wonderful icicles that hang down outside. Light comes in the windows and the skylights, and you might as well be sleeping in a tent you are so close to nature.
I never meant to be here in the winter, but then I started teaching, and I love the students, so I can’t leave. Besides, I get a lot of work done when I’m snowed in. No chiggers, no pollen, and never a dull moment trying to outwit an E. Fay Jones house and stay warm: my main line of defense is heated mattress pads and UGG boots. It used to be heated blankets, but the hippies say heated blankets cause cancer so I switched to heated mattress pads.
My other home is a small condominium on a beach in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. I bought it in 1995 to be near my three eldest grandchildren when they were growing up. I wanted to be there to drive the girls to dancing lessons and watch my grandson play baseball and basketball. I had seen my own sons grow up. I know how fast it happens. If you aren’t there to watch it, you don’t get a second chance.
It is a twelve-hour drive from Fayetteville to the Mississippi coast: I start off going due north and downhill. By the time I am forty miles down the mountains, it’s warmer. By the time I get to my brother’s house in Jackson, Mississippi, where my family has a long history, I can take off my boots and put on pretty shoes. I usually spend the night in Jackson, where I see my nieces and nephews and my mother’s antique furniture, which my sister-in-law lets my brother keep, wall to wall, in every room. My childhood is in my brother’s house, and I like to visit there and be reminded. I usually stay until noon, then drive the last four hours to Ocean Springs.
My sparsely furnished three-bedroom condominium is waiting for me there, looking and feeling just like home. The condo is a no-worries house. Even on cold days, it’s as warm as toast. “So this is how normal people live,” I’m always thinking. “They are nice and warm and don’t have to wear boots inside their houses.”
I take a deep breath, carry my clothes upstairs, and take the sign off my typewriter that says, “Do not touch this machine. This is how grandmother makes a living.”
The Mississippi coast is not like south Florida, but it always seems warm enough for sandals and short-sleeved shirts, except for now and then. In Ocean Springs, I take long walks on the beach every morning, watch sunsets on the pier, and wait for various offspring to come visit. It’s wonderful to have a refrigerator full of whole milk and chocolate pudding. I even buy juice boxes. I like to see them sitting there, just the right size for certain little girls and boys, something they can handle. I especially like the little straws that are attached to the boxes.
When I am in Ocean Springs, I have many grandchildren and great-grandchildren within reach. They are not as easy to handle as adults, but they have nonstop energy and imagination and never have to go to the doctor for colonoscopies or skin cancer checks, or get prescription drugs for sleeplessness. Children live in the present, and since I am trying to learn to do that, they are my favorite companions in my old age. I like to watch children sleep. You can walk around a room and take things out of drawers and it does not awaken them. Children sleep in a state of grace. I have much to learn from them before I get any deeper into my seventies (now eighties).
My condominium complex is the only thing on Ocean Springs’s two beaches that survived Hurricane Katrina. The contents of the lower floors were swept out to sea by a forty-foot wave, but the structures were sound when the wave receded. Thanks to the smart people who serve on the condominium board, we were well insured when it came time to rebuild and repair. In September 2007, I moved back into my condo and went to work spending all my money to fill it back up with furniture and beds and toys. I refuse to let my grandchildren think a once-in-a-lifetime storm can ruin all our fun.
If I were younger, I might have sold the place, but my older grandchildren lost their childhood home in the storm and need a place to stay when they
come home for weddings and festivals and to see their friends. Besides, I love Ocean Springs as much as I love Fayetteville. I like to walk on the beach and marvel at the flatness of the land, and watch the sun rise and fall on the Gulf of Mexico. Since the hurricane, I like to look out at the sea and think about all the silver and china and lamps and furniture and coffeepots and toys and bicycles that were swept out to sea. All the old letter jackets and cheerleading costumes and dance recital props and leaf blowers and automobiles. The red electric truck I bought for the children to drive to the beach, and then drive home and inside through the sliding glass doors, is out there somewhere, rusted now, perhaps a home for squid or barracuda.
The children and I were planning on buying a new truck, but while I was in Fayetteville the builder put on new doors, and they’re too narrow to drive a truck through. Maybe we’ll build a toy garage.
I am a lucky woman. I have two homes that wrap around me and make me feel safe. Fayetteville, beautiful little wooded town. Nothing to do but teach school and write books and wait for the mail. Ocean Springs, children and toys and a typewriter that is mostly turned to the wall. Moist air that fills in my wrinkles and curls my hair. No worries, no freezing, no shoes.
Update: We found an electric green truck at a garage sale. It only cost twenty-five dollars and isn’t as dependable as the red Chevrolet Silverado but it is a lot faster, once it starts.
Things like the Truth Page 10
